Supplying Help at the Border
7/19/2018 — Has your church been looking for a way to help in the crisis at the US / Mexico border? Here are two collections of supplies that your church can contribute to now. Our fellow UCC churches are doing the work at the border directly with both the children and adults who are coming across the border, being detained, and being released. This is a tangible way to make God’s love and justice real and a way for us to help our sister churches doing the work.
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Themes in anticipation of Independence Day: social and spiritual freedom
On Political and Social Freedom
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. — Benjamin Franklin
The function of freedom is to free someone else. — Toni Morrison
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. — Woodrow Wilson
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. — George Orwell
Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation. — Coretta Scott King
For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. — Nelson Mandela
Peace is more than just the absence of war. True peace is justice, true peace is freedom. And true peace dictates the recognition of human rights. — Ronald Reagan
Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought. — Pope John Paul II
On Spiritual Freedom
Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will, and creative imagination. These give us the utlimate human freedom … The power to choose, to respond, to change. — Stephen Covey
Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain … To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices – today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but to embrace it. — Kevyn Alcouin
All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not … At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. ― Richard Rohr
Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything – anger, anxiety, or possessions – we cannot be free. — Thich Nhat Hahn
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope, free of mountainous wanting. — Rumi
There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin. — Anne Lamott
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. — Hannah Arendt
To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. — Eckhard Tolle
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Dreams of freedom & justice as themes from prophet Ezekiel
My Mind Stayed on Freedom — Spiritual adapted by Odetta Holmes (Well, I) woke up this mornin’ with my mind stayed on freedom … Oh well, I’m walkin’ and talkin’ walkin’ and talkin’ with my mind stayed on freedom … Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah.
Musings on Justice
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. — Reinhold Niebuhr
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. — Aristotle
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph. — Haile Selassie
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. — Frederick Douglass
Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both. — Eleanor Roosevelt
Election days come and go. But the struggle of the people to create a government which represents all of us and not just the one percent – a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice – that struggle continues. — Bernie Sanders
Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door. — Charles Dickens
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. — Wendell Berry
If you want peace work for justice. — Pope Paul VI
Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens. — Plato
In the real world, as lived and experienced by real people, the demand for human rights and dignity, the longing for liberty and justice and opportunity, the hatred of oppression and corruption and cruelty is reality. — John McCain
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. — Albert Camus
Dreams of Freedom & Justice
I Am Waiting (excerpt) — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
… I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail …
I Have a Dream … When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness … I have a dream today! … This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with … With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And this will be the day … And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. — Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream (excerpt)
America — Allen Ginsberg
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing … America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I’d better get right down to the job … America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
America — Claude McKay
… I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood …
… because my senses have caught up with my body
